I lifted it up over my shoulder, hoping I was doing the right thing.
Elizabeth stopped singing when I walked back into the room. I kneeled before her on the floor because she was a queen, and she deserved my respect. I placed my forehead against her leg, and her hand went to my hair. “What’s this?” she asked.
I breathed and breathed and breathed.
I sat back as she dropped her hand. She watched me curiously.
I pulled the backpack around, clutching it tightly. “This is all I have.”
“Is it? I don’t believe that for a moment. You have so much more than could fit into such a little bag.”
I shook my head. “You said that memories aren’t the most important thing. And maybe you’re right. But sometimes they are important. And these are my memories. Everything I have.” I had to force myself to hand it over to her. She waited until I let it go before pulling it into her lap. “Open it.”
She did without question, and I thought I loved her for it.
“Oh,” she said as she peered inside. “Oh, oh. Look. Robbie. Look.” She pulled out the stone wolf. Kelly’s wolf. “After all this time?”
I nodded. “I thought it was mine.”
“It is yours,” she said. “Because it was given to you. On a bright and sunny day. Kelly was nervous. He asked me if I thought you’d accept it. I told him I believed you would with all my heart. He didn’t know that you’d already come to me a few days before to ask me the same thing.”
I stared at her with wide eyes. “Really?”
She grinned. “Really.”
“Mysterious,” I whispered.
“What was that?”
I shook my head. “It’s not…. It doesn’t matter. Just something Kelly told me once. Did… does he still have mine? I mean, it’s okay if he doesn’t, I get that a lot has happened, and he doesn’t have to—”
“Look in the drawer.” She nodded toward the nightstand.
I did with shaking hands.
There, lying on a felt cloth, was another stone wolf. It was markedly similar to the one Elizabeth now held. The style, the pose, the stance. There were different cuts in the stone. The one in the drawer looked as if it’d been carved with a clumsier hand, but it was so close to the one I’d carried with me. They looked like a set, like they belonged together.
Elizabeth didn’t say a word as I took the other wolf from her and placed it on the cloth next to Kelly’s. I pushed them together. It was one thing to hear that I mattered. It was something else entirely to have evidence of it.
I closed the drawer, knowing they’d be safe there.
Elizabeth allowed me a moment to collect my thoughts. I wiped my face before motioning for her to continue.
She took out my mother’s driver’s license next. She smiled at the photograph. “Beatrice.”
“Yeah. She… ah. She was a good person.”
“I know she was. I knew her only briefly, but she was a light. I could see that even though we were both young. I’m so sorry that she’s not here to see you as you are and all you’ve become.”
I nodded and looked away.
She went through the rest of the contents of the backpack. There was a pinecone from a forest. A flower pressed between the pages of an old romance about pirates. A photograph, the edges bent, of me surrounded by cubs. She was blue when she saw it, but it didn’t last. It filled with something sharper, something that felt like a great, lumbering beast.
She slowly pulled out the leather journal.
The backpack slid from her lap.
“Where did you find this?” she whispered.